The Daily Neut

None of this is to say that a good network-neutrality rule must be absolute, or even close to absolute. It’s an open secret that AT&T and Verizon want to become more like cable television companies. If Verizon wants to build a private network to sell TV, that would justify broad powers to control the network, a precondition to providing the service at all. No neutrality rule should be a bar to building better networks that do more.

OK, so why are you trying to do just that, prevent American companies from building better networks?

The real issue for “net neutrality” is that an advanced internet needs to be built, financed, and initiated through the government help, like it is in Korea, Japan, and China. That’s why our access charges are so steep relative to these places. Put big pipes everwhere, and the high class QoS services can easily coexist with the best effort folks. That’s an issue of capital infrastructure deployment and build-out, which in the US, with its lack of centralized planning for such things, doesn’t exist. Hopefully rapid deployment of true competitive access schemes (Broadband Power Line, WiMax) might alleviate this problem. But that takes a new policy, committment, and intervention, with a quid-pro-quo of warranties of operability.

Yet perhaps without realizing it, those who are now advocating “net neutrality”– the notion that those who shell out the big bucks to build new much higher speed networks can’t ask the websites that will use the networks intensively to help pay for them– could keep this new world from becoming a reality. Further, they could deprive the websites themselves of the benefits of being able to use the networks to deliver their data-heavy content.

I hate to break it to you, but Larry Lessig and Tim BL didn’t invent the Internet. TBL’s contribution, HTTP, was certainly a nice wrinkle, once we got the performance issues ironed out. But the larger point here is that many of the Internet’s Old Guard are opposed to change, which isn’t very surprising. Others are very much in favor of allowing the Internet to progress, along with all the other networks that didn’t exist in 1980; David Clark for example.

But I appreciate the contributions that the Citizen Engineers are making to the debate, you certainly bring an earnest religious fervor that we seldom see in the world of streams and pipes.

I’m sure your list of supporters know a lot about networks…that doesn’t mean that they’re not wrong. This isn’t a fight between the evil telcos and the “little guy.” This a fight between the telcos and the software giants like Microsoft and Google. Let them duke it out in the market. And let the telcos build the networks that benefit all of us.

Not sure I feel as threatened as many NN opponents seem to be. I find nothing wrong with expanding our broadband infrastructure and capabilities, and introducing Americans to the next generation of Internet usage. Cluck makes a good point too – Google and Microsoft aren’t exactly start-ups, and I find it hard to believe that either would ever act in the interest of companies that might one day become their competitors.